But Gary McGraw, a security researcher and author of the virtual-world focused book Exploiting Online Games, says that Second Life won't be significantly affected by the ban.
In the real - rather than virtual - world, Washington is known to favour a Palestinian state only as part of a negotiated agreement with Israel, with which it has strong ties.
To be most fair to players, virtual-world politics need to move the way of the real world by enacting democratic systems so players can create the rules they would like to live by online, he said.
Dropping it to 16C - the lowest setting in this virtual world - only shaves 7% off carbon emissions.
Real power lies in leveraging the virtual world to drive real-world events that bring people together in the flesh.
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Open to the public since January 2009 as a two-year project, it was created within the multi-user virtual world Second Life but possesses a charmingly post-apocalyptic visual sensibility all its own.
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But all eyes are going to be on Amazon and how it fares in the non-virtual world.
Following a federal investigation, Second Life's parent company, Linden Lab, banned all gambling in the virtual world--a major source of its business.
In the non-virtual world the Kremlin has deployed its youth movement to occupy large public spaces, brought troops into the centre of Moscow and cordoned off the main squares.
For the most part most data centers are operating in the pre-virtual world, in which the pace of change is governed by the rate at which physical servers can come and go.
Now, in a sign that virtual issues increasingly are bleeding into the real world, some "residents" of Second Life are taking virtual property rights to real-world court, citing California consumer protection laws to make their case.
PlayStation Home, a 3-D virtual world on PlayStation Network, also says its virtual goods sales are doing well.
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In Home, players control a customized avatar in a lush, high-definition, 3-D virtual world where they can find new friends or play games together in the world.
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Implenia's engineers could use that virtual world mock-up to remotely track the data center's power consumption and efficiency in ways that would have otherwise been tough without visiting the location.
Perhaps his savviest find was Orozco, the Mexican conceptual artist who, through the patronage of Lopez and others, went from virtual unknown to art-world hotshot mainly through the popularity of his Cibachromes, which are photographic prints saturated with colors.
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The virtual reconstruction of Implenia's data center pulled information about the layout of servers and storage, the devices' temperatures, power consumption and data processing over the Internet to IBM's servers, where they were built into a 3-D virtual world model.
Despite "Second Life's" waning popularity as a destination for businesses--partly a result of virtual vandalism and other unpredictable behavior by the world's more eccentric inhabitants--she insists that private virtual worlds like Forterra's can offer many of the same advantages without the risks to security and productivity.
Sony has targeted the same family audience with its game world, which features mini-games like go kart racing and the ability to socialize with gamers of all ages in a cartoon-style 3D virtual world.
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While it is an MMO, with levels and achievements, Glitch is quite open-ended like a virtual world.
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Players in Second Life break plenty of physical laws, flying and teleporting around their virtual world and crafting made-to-order bodies and buildings.
Similarly, an Israeli team at the University of Haifa recently built a disturbingly realistic virtual world of suicide bus-bombings to treat attack survivors.
Peter Moore, president of EA Sports, part of Electronic Arts, a games company, says that some gamers like to recreate what they see during live NASCAR races in video games, using online information about speed, drag, tyre pressure and so forth to recreate, in a virtual world, the real-life action.
Entire virtual economies have emerged, assigning real-world monetary value to items or skills in games.
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Putting sensitive real-world data into the virtual world presents a few privacy problems, Paradiso admits.
As I outlined in Virtual Currencies and Roach Motels, in-world economies are the perfect crucible for launching unrestricted currency competition and that competition will enable further opportunities for transporting virtual world earnings to real world value.
One such technology is Third Voice, a browser add-on that lets anyone stick virtual Post-it Notes on any Web page, for the whole world to see.
Moving over to a side stage, Harwell was able to perform another tune--and this time, the main screen of the keynote stage showed a full-on virtual Smash Mouth, with digital avatars of each band member reflecting their real-world movements.
And in a world of 24-hour virtual trading, it makes little difference whether a commodities deal is brokered in Saadiyat or Chicago.
Treasure hunts turn up empty, cows die and virtual currencies are even more volatile than their real-world counterparts.
The Rest of the World segment includes Ortel Mobile - virtual network operator offering mobile services though its own brand and partners.
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